The Psychopath Inside (3 page)

One question people often ask is if there is a difference between a sociopath and a psychopath. Barring the fact that many
psychologists deny the existence of either, in a clinical setting the difference is purely semantic. Robert Hare has pointed out that sociologists are more likely to focus on the environmental or socially modifiable facets of the disorder, so prefer the term
sociopathy
, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists prefer to include the genetic, cognitive, and emotional factors as well as the social factors when making a diagnosis, and therefore would opt for
psychopathy
. Since I am a brain scientist and am interested in the genetic and neurological causes of this personality disorder, I will use the term
psychopath
for the purposes of this book. And I will use it to describe people with some combination of those four facets of the Hare Checklist: interpersonal, affective, behavioral, and antisocial traits.

•   •   •

I have been interested in the brain ever since I saw the movie
Charly
when I was a junior in college in 1968. It is a story about an intellectually handicapped man who has the will to change his life and to learn how to learn. And learn he does, temporarily becoming a genius after undergoing a new neurosurgical procedure, the same procedure done to his alter ego, a laboratory mouse. This prescient film on the biological and chemical basis of behavior provided a clear career direction for me.

Throughout my career, I have studied many facets of the brain. Whereas most researchers tend to specialize in a relatively narrow field of study, my interests have covered all manner of territory—from stem cells to sleep deprivation.

I started studying psychopathy in the 1990s, when I was asked
by my colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, to analyze PET scans of particularly violent murderers, including serial killers, who had just been convicted in court, and were subsequently starting the penalty phase of their trials. It is during this stage of the legal process that a murderer typically agrees to undergo a brain scan, often in the hope that a finding of brain damage will lead to a more lenient sentence.

As I've already mentioned, we know very little about psychopathy, but without scanning technology, we'd probably know even less. It's easy for a psychopath to feign caring and remorse when his brain tells a different story. This is the work I'd been doing that October day in 2005, when I discovered my odd brain scan indicating reduced activity in areas responsible for empathy and ethics.

You might assume, given my closeness to the subject, that I'd be scared or worried or upset. But I wasn't because I knew better. I was a happily married man with three kids whom I loved dearly. I had never been violent or manipulative or committed a dangerous crime. I wasn't some Hannibal Lecter type—an esteemed brain scientist studying the minds of unsuspecting patients in an attempt to understand how I might be better able to control them for my benefit. Heck, I was a research scientist—I didn't even have patients!

But my brain scan did tell me something I hadn't fully understood before. I had just submitted a paper outlining the research I had done into the minds of psychopaths. I had laid out a theory
describing the neuroanatomical basis of psychopathy and identified a pattern that I myself matched. So how could I reconcile my brain with the findings I'd just reported? Was I really an exception to my own rule? If I wasn't a psychopath, what was I? And if we couldn't rely on studies of our own brains, the very organ responsible for every thought and action we have, how could we ever understand who we truly are?

T
he media and pop culture have done a great job over the years painting pictures of psychopathic children or disturbed kids who grow up to be violent killers. Just consider every time there's a school shooting; afterward, the friends, family, classmates, and teachers of the individual responsible seem to notice all of the warning signs that should have predicted what was to come. When parents see signs of abnormal or antisocial behavior in their kids, they immediately call the doctor, hoping therapy or prescription meds will head off any danger at the pass.

That's one reason why I originally gave little thought to my brain scan. I had had a happy childhood, and it wasn't until I started reflecting on certain episodes in the context of my research and personal discovery that I started to see indications that I was not like the other boys.

I was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, at 7:07 a.m. on October 18, 1947, weighing seven pounds and seven ounces. Although I'm not a superstitious person, my lucky number by default has always been seven. The pregnancy was not a difficult one, but was angst-filled for my parents, who had already experienced four
miscarriages leading up to my uneventful birth. According to what my parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents have told me, I was a happy baby and toddler, but not so happy that I didn't drive my older brother, Jack, crazy with my crying.

According to my mother and several other family members, I was an “adorable happy baby” with no behavioral problems, although I developed severe, untreated asthma in my second year of life, a malady that follows me to this day. The difficulty breathing for days at a time would lead to some of my earliest and most lasting memories. I recently asked my mother to describe my personality until I hit puberty, and if my behavior changed or was strange in any way during this time. For adjectives, she said that throughout this period I was “adorable, lovable, straightforward, mischievous, inquisitive, capable, cheerful, insightful, likable, friendly, a prankster,” and added, “a pain in the ass, take your pick.”

Over the years my family members told me similar things about my childhood self. They told me I was a beautiful toddler, and that my grandfather even once entered me into a national toddler beauty contest. My father carried me everywhere we went together, and this bonding continued even into my preadolescent years when he would take me to bars with him to play pool and darts and shuffleboard games, and sit at the bar and talk to the owners. We would go on fishing trips together, including overnight stays in the Adirondacks. He started taking me to the Thoroughbred and harness tracks at Saratoga Springs starting in 1950, when I was three, and I have made it a point to go to the
track in Saratoga every August since for sixty-three straight years, and to go trout fishing whenever possible. I was also close to my mother, and learned how to cook and sew and iron from her at a very early age.

My family moved from Poughkeepsie in 1951, when I was four, and I started kindergarten the next year at St. Patrick's School in Cohoes, New York. A Catholic primary school taught by nuns, it provided a happy time without incident. Well, there was one incident. While practicing to make my First Communion in first grade, I started joking around and my teacher put me into a trash basket, butt down, for fifteen minutes. Some of my classmates looked at me, feet up in the air, with fear in their eyes, while a couple of goofball guys held back laughs. I distinctly remember thinking the scene was funny, so I made some goofball faces back at my classmates, earning an additional fifteen minutes of hard time. I believe it was at that moment when I began my career as class clown, and it's a disposition I still can't shake. When I was fifty-eight, I got kicked out of a sensitivity class along with a well-known TV network newswoman with whom I was flirting and giggling while a serious touchy-feely session was going on with thirty other people. I swear she was one of the girls in my St. Patrick's first-grade class who got me into hot water with the nuns.

A few years later we moved from Cohoes to nearby, upscale Loudonville, where I attended fourth through sixth grades at Loudonville School. These three years at the end of my primary schooling were uniformly bright and wonderful. I remember many of the individual days from those years, and I flourished
academically and socially. My teachers were particularly talented, and one, Miss Winnie Smith, has to be one of the greatest primary schoolteachers of all time. She was well liked by most of us, but treated me with particular attention, and encouraged me to act in school plays, to play musical instruments, to draw, and to partake in all social activities, which I did with such enjoyment that I can remember dozens of even the most mundane events throughout that fifth-grade year with her at the helm.

During my later primary school years I occasionally worked in my father and uncle's pharmacy in Troy. My early interests in the natural world, animals, gardening, the outdoors—fueled by a native aptitude for science, math, and engineering—provided me with a comfortable interaction with the pharmacists. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a scientist. I was fascinated by what makes us who we are and why we are here. All the medical talk and sensory banquet one experiences working in the back rooms of a large pharmacy were incredible preparation for the future. It all fascinated me from the beginning, and I would continue working in the pharmacy in junior high school and high school. I was interested in all of the drugs, and the chemistry of the basic ingredients of the apothecary. Then I discovered the brown bottles of potassium nitrate, or saltpeter. After a few questions to the young pharmacists, I discovered that this compound was a key ingredient in gunpowder, probably something I didn't need to know. The pharmacy was well stocked with basic chemicals, and I quickly located the other ingredients: charcoal, sulfur, and an accelerant, magnesium oxide. This began a long love affair with
explosives and all things that go boom. I started making my own fireworks and then graduated, with the help of a particularly daring friend, to making larger and larger pipe bombs, which we detonated on a regular basis for years. About the same time, two other friends with a penchant for starting fires and shooting guns invited me along on their adventures, which often ended in grand field fires that threatened to burn down their own houses. With two of these friends we would also try to act tough, but we were just mischievous boys, hardly malevolent, although if we tried getting away with that stuff today, we'd be in jail every week. Some of my friends were also into shooting animals with guns—nailing birds or pegging cows in the ass—but that never interested me.

We were hellions on nights sanctioned for mayhem, such as Halloween, my favorite holiday. We pulled off every prank imaginable but never hurt anyone, and at the end of the night, loaded down by bags chockablock full of candy, we would drop them off at the convent for charity, or maybe just to keep the nuns sweet the next time they had a reason for disciplining us. We were not bad kids, just pranksters. For me, the innate drive to tease and torment people may have a dark side, but the way it would ultimately express itself after the joke was over usually had a light side.

My penchant for such shenanigans may have been learned. My father and uncle were both pranksters, with my uncle Arnold, my father's pharmacy partner, and my maternal great-uncle Charlie being the masters. But in all cases their practical jokes ended on a positive note. My father and uncle would pretend to their poorer customers that they were price-gouging them, when in
reality they were slashing their prices by up to 90 percent. If someone came in wanting to buy a cane that cost ten dollars, they'd give him a sly look instead of naming the real price and say, “That'll be two dollars.” I would watch them do this time and time again, and the pranks, although they made these customers a bit crazy, were really done to ensure that the less-fortunate clientele could maintain their dignity without going broke.

As grade school became junior high and high school, I transitioned to Shaker High School, a public school in nearby Colonie. It was a new and experimental school and sported high-tech features such as computerization, even back in 1959. My years at Shaker were also uniformly terrific, and I was given every opportunity to flourish academically, socially, and in the arts, music, and sports. This was a tremendous school with some gifted teachers, and I loved every year there.

For my entire postpubescent life, I felt that I was a nice, regular guy—kind, helpful, and fun to be around. Although I said some curious things now and again, I was accepted by most people and found that they wanted to hang out with me, and that many people wanted to be my playmate and often close friend. I seemed to get along with girls and women better than most guys, and my numerous long-standing close friendships, from my teenage years to the present, provided proof that I was not only a man's man, but also one who could form close friendships with women.

Physically, I was not intimidating—just short of six feet tall and weighing between 180 and 220 pounds throughout high school and college—nor aggressive. I did not fight with people,
and was one of the more calmly behaved of my siblings, who ranged from very introverted to very extroverted and who had a range of aggressive interactions with people throughout life. I have four brothers and a sister. Jack was born first, followed by me five years later. Four years after that came my brother Peter, followed three years later by Tom, then Mark two years later, and finally Carol the year after that. Pete was always a handful. He has ADHD and was climbing the walls and getting into mischief. Jack was more aggressive than I was and got into a lot of fights. Tom, Mark, Carol, and I were pretty calm.

I wasn't known as a fighter, but I'd go after a bully if I saw him picking on someone. I'd step in and tell him to stop. If I needed to, I'd muscle him and lift him off the ground and tell him I was going to kill him. This happened a number of times, starting when I was around twelve. One time when I was nineteen or twenty, I saw my buddy provoking a fight in a bar and I pulled him away, but the other guy went after him. I thought that wasn't fair, so I grabbed the guy by the scruff and yanked him outside. My friend wanted me to hold him while he hit him, but I thought that wasn't fair, either, so I refused. While many of the males in my family are athletic and several just love to fight, I never developed a taste for pugilism, preferring to mentally pummel someone than to do so using bare knuckles. Even in high school I couldn't get all psyched up for a wrestling match or football game, opting always to get to my opponent by just rattling him and making him laugh by any means necessary. I loved sports in this way, never serious or violent, but just good, romping fun.

While in junior high, I developed obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifested itself partially as an obsession with religion, in particular my mother's Catholicism. No one in my family or inner circle ever pushed me into religion, and I kept this as much to myself as possible. Only one priest, and my mother, seemed to notice the emerging obsession. I began to sneak off to daily Mass, and would spend every waking moment on Saturdays preparing to confess my sins on Saturday night, so that I could continue to take the sacraments on a daily basis. Throughout my entire youth, including my six years in junior high and high school, I never missed Sunday Mass or all the holy days of obligation. I lived in a secret world completely controlled by an internal mechanism of pointing out weaknesses in my character, and even in my perceptions. Always vigilant for purity and perfection, I began to make up sins that were quite bizarre. My priest tried to tell me in confession that what I was describing to him each week were not sins at all, and even though I knew they really weren't sins, I would mutate them into destructive ideations so that they became “sins.”

It's not unusual for OCD sufferers to put a moral spin on their obsessions. One of my more bizarre drives was to pay as much attention to the left side of my personal space, extending outward to infinity, as to my right side. I would keep count of this internal space orientation, and at the end of each ten to twenty seconds of such internal dialogue, I would realize that I had spent one more second attending to one side than the other. That became a mortal sin. But then I would decide that thinking
incorrectly like this would be another mortal sin on top of the first. At twelve years old, I could sit alone on a park bench, not moving, and commit forty mortal sins, each worthy of eternal damnation, in a one-hour period. This would continue for hours and days and dominated my inner life for two entire years. Generally I could hide the angst generated by this florid, obsessive-compulsive world, but it was eating me up, to be sure. At the same time, I was experiencing spontaneous moments of dread and doom lasting up to half an hour. These then became associated with an ongoing religious or, more correctly, spiritual crisis, that lasted for years. All of this occurred in the complete absence of any external pressure from family, friends, or church personnel. If anything, they tried to get me to chill out.

Aside from my attention to symmetry, I also had to wash my hands repeatedly. And walking to the school bus, I would waver thirty feet in each direction picking up litter, leaving a swath of cleanliness behind me. Everything became a moral issue. I had to be perfect, and I had to have good intentions about everything. If I did something good but it wasn't from the heart, I would start thinking that it was immoral. I knew it was crazy, but I couldn't put an end to it. Eventually I stopped telling people because they said it was insane. I couldn't even imagine stealing or breaking rules. I refused to have sex as a teenager, even when I was dating Diane, the woman who would become my wife, because I saw it as immoral. After several years she finally said enough is enough.

Years later, when I was in my sixties, my mother told me a story she remembers about my OCD. It was the summer of 1961.
I was thirteen years old and had been very social all my life. But suddenly, with no apparent trigger, I closed off and crawled into my own little world. I had nothing to do, but the guy next door had a beat-up old boat sitting in his yard. I looked at that and said maybe if I fix it up I could use it to go fishing. I retreated to work on the boat every day, sometimes for up to fourteen hours. I didn't talk to many people and I sank into a mood.